emblem
by songs
Summary: three times katara touches zuko's scar; — ო zutara.


**title: **emblem, aka "the mark of the brave"

**pairing: **zuko ო katara.

**summary: **Three times Katara touches Zuko's scar.

**disclaimer: **own nothing.

**notes: **please please please please please review? please? x33333

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**i.** Ba Sing Se is a beginning and ending in itself—a touch, a promise, a flicker of _what could have been—_all of this, a breath before betrayal. Red. White. _Porcelain-white, _fate-red. The silver, moon-blessed water hangs from her wrist, but what she will always remember is the press of old, dead skin in her palm—_The Mark of The Brave_—and the way his eyelids whisper shut in the same moment skin touches skin.

_I've been saving this for something important, _she tells him, and as he listens, in that bare, crescent of time, something changes within him. Later, after he leaves with his sister in a sweep of fire and lightning, this will be what haunts her, what brings her blood to boiling oceans: the openness in his gaze, the softening of his face—a shift, a shift not in flesh or bones or fire or water but down to the soul.

She sees this. And she will not forget.

The scar (_I see, my face…) _is rooted somewhere deeper, somewhere she does not know if she can heal. But the brief, split-second: _healing water breathing over the broken fire_, is a connection she will not ever be able to erase, no matter what the hatred, no matter what the anger, the humiliation.

_She touched his scar first_—he will never tell her this, but after Ba Sing Se, after witnessing the look in his eyes, the gratitude he could never put to words, it is something she will always, always know.

X

**ii.** "This is you?" she asks, leaning over his shoulder. "I mean, _really _you? Not Ozai, whom you _so happen _to freakishly resemble?"

He grunts, rolling his eyes, voice flat:

"I wonder why." A beat, and then. "And yes, it is."

The painting is muted from within the ruby-jeweled frame: a boy with long hair, pulled back, beaming widely—and a woman, with bright eyes and lips and her arm around him.

Silence. Katara notices the knotting of his shoulders, the stiffness of his spine, and says, gently: "She… she's beautiful."

"…I know," he says, at length, and shifts towards her ever-so-slightly. This is all it takes. She folds her legs beneath her and sits, close enough for their thighs to touch.

He traces the picture with his index finger, lingering on the left side of his painted, child- face. "My father banished her when I was ten. I… don't know where she is."

Quiet overtakes them, until Katara finds her voice, and braves the question: "Do you… do you want to find her? To… meet her again?"

His finger stiffens over the boy-face in the painting, right where the scar would come to be.

It seems like an eternity of quiet. And then:

"…No. I don't."

His voice shakes a little, swallows half of the _no, _but she understands. She _knows._

Suddenly feeling bold, she moves to rake a thick, tuft of hair out of his face, her bone-fingers skimming beneath the hair and over the red of his scar.

"…Zuko," is all she says, but the shape of his name is heavy in her voice, and after that, neither one of them speaks at all.

X

**iii. **They are at the comet's edge when Katara finds herself drenched in bending-water and sweat and full, summer moonlight—Zuko is a ways off, shirt discarded, palms glowing with flames.

She's laughing, now—they've been at this for hours, and Aang and Toph and Suki and Sokka are all asleep because midnight was three spars ago and Aang trains at dawn but _she doesn't care _because she hasn't laughed like this in ages, hasn't breathed this easily, hasn't felt her heart shiver like this in a _lifetime_—and Zuko, with Zuko she is open, she is air, _no, _she is water. She is anything and everything she wants to be and she doesn't know if she ever wants it to end.

She bends the water from her hair, suddenly, smiling, and says, without even thinking: "Let's go inside. My room's far from everyone else's, we can—"

Zuko's face falls the same moment her heart does.

"…Katara," he says, slowly, and she takes a step back right when he takes one forward.

"I—just. Nevermind. That was stupid. That was really, really—I'm not, I'm really, really…"

And heartbeat-quick, he is a tremble away, staring down at her, eyes wild as his element—and she sees everything, then, in the rouge of the stars: the dark, inky hair, wet and matted to the flush of his skin; his eyes, yellow-gold, open and awake and _longing_, she realizes, _longing _and maybe a little desperate and framed with white and then the red, the scar—_his father gave that to him, _she remembers, remembers the whispered, half-murmur at the lip of the ocean, the truth, the way her soul sank for him—and everything else, from the angle of his jaw to the bob of his throat and the jut of his collar. Everything. It all hits her like lightning, like oceans, and she doesn't even think, blink, breathe when she leans up to him and their lips collide, her hands on either side of his face, his own grip instinctively coiling around her waist.

"_Katara_—" And she's never heard her name sound more like a plea, and she pulls back a half-moment after he does.

"…You're…sure?_" _he asks, and everything unsaid translates into the way he looks at her: _You hated me; I betrayed you; I don't want you to be hurt because of me again._

She says nothing. Instead, this time, she gently takes his face into her hands. She looks him straight in the eye—gold whispering over the sea—and her blackbird lashes curl shut, as she cranes upward to press a soft kiss onto the ridge of his scar.

He lets out a low, heartbreaking sound, almost as gossamer as her touch. She trails gentle circles at the nape of his neck, the riverbend of his jaw, and even when Katara pulls her lips away, she does not move out of his grasp, and neither does he.


End file.
